Creation of the CITM Shared Services Work Group was approved at the CITM business meeting of the 2008 conference held at the University of San Francisco, based on a proposal by Tracy Schroeder. The initial charge to the Work Group was to
- Research best practices in the area of shared services
- Explore and propose a governance model for AJCU shared IT services
- Define the scope of the AJCU shared services effort
- Identify the top three potential areas for a pilot AJCU shared services project
Initially chaired by Tracy Schroeder (2008 – 2009), and subsequently by Bret Jacobs (2009 – 2011) and Patrick Frontiera (2011 – forward), group membership varied from six to nine people over the course of work. The group focused on opportunities in three areas: a shared hosted or open source LMS, joint disaster recovery or hot site opportunities, and PPM SaaS.
Despite much work, little progress was made on the first and last opportunities. However, a disaster recovery matchmaking program was designed that allowed pairs of AJCU institutions to provide co-location services to each other. The program was successfully launched in 2012, pairing Fordham and Santa Clara Universities.
Largely through the work of Steve Gallagher as CITM president, an AJCU purchasing portal to aggregate volume was launched in 2012 and consortium pricing was arranged for D2L and Canvas.
For a more detailed version of the Shared Services history, click here.